Our ecosystem has expanded significantly over the last couple of years. Thousands of exceptional custom websites have been built on Edicy. Most of them are crafted by our partners and freelancers from around the world.

One of the most requested features by a swarm of web developers has been the ability to alter the looks and components of individual pages and blog posts. For example to give each blog post a unique thumbnail or cover image. Or apply a different background image for any of the pages on a site.

Today we are happy to announce that this major update — custom data fields — has been released and available on all paid accounts. You can now bind any kind of data not only to entire site but also for each page or blog post separately.

Let's say you want to set a different background picture for each of your page. Before you had to create a new layout for every page to make it happen — or use extensive JavaScript. Now you can just set up a drop area for the background image in the template for the website owner. In addition, you can call it out anywhere on your website with a unique id. This way you can set a background picture for your article and display it also on your front page as a thumbnail or cover image. A perfect solution for photo blogs.

The scope of possibilities is huge — unique background colors, Facebook post images and other OG-tags, text attributes, icons for menu items, configurable widgets like distance / price / tax calculators or Flickr galleries, page layout modulators etc. Go ahead, read our renewed APIfor more or jump straight to the examples. Feel free to contact us via support@edicy.com. We'd be really happy to help you get new flexible customer websites up and running.

The simplicity of Edicy does not only rely on the everyday usability, but also on the fact that we are offering a one-stop-shop for running a site – hosting, content and domain management, code editor with a knowledge base for more technical people, as well as a super friendly helpdesk.

And we've been rewarded a thousand times for our work – each day sees more and more tailor-made sites built on Edicy, pleasing on the eye, helping people in their daily life while offering and finding different services.

omaasi.com / youroffice.ee – these two sites created by Velvet Digital Paper have been out there for more than a year. Both of them use a similar one page layout onto which a blog and product list has been built using our catalogue tool. Both of the sites are also optimized to look good on mobile devices – a feature common to most Edicy sites unless deliberately built differently.

tallinnbicykleweek.ee / minuunistustepaev.ee – a revolution in the streets and evolutionary changes in mindset. Edicy has the honor of hosting sites of a number of NGOs who not only care about the people and physical environment around them but have transformed this knowledge into beautiful and functional websites. With the help of designers of course. Two of them, Tallinn Bicykle Week and "Day of my dreams" are combining photos and simple messages to interact with their viewer – a smart move since photos of actual people and events are powerful means of telling a story. Especially when speaking about web – long texts belong to books printed on paper.

filmmusic.ee / tab.ee / lightbiennale.ee – sites for different festivals and events, promoting Estonian composers, architectural heritage and the magical work of light designers. All of these sites originate from dudes at aku.co. These sites create a good showcase of what can be done with our catalogue tool – events, authors and publications can be filtered by name, event title or other characteristics to create a holistic overview for the visitor. The coding of these three sites has been done by Fraktal.co and Newtime.

Didn't find a suitable website design from our theme gallery? Tired of your old design? Do you need a specific functionality, layout or structure? Don't worry, our growing list of partners would gladly help you out with all your customization wishes.

We have added a direct link to the design theme panel for ordering a custom design from our partners:

We've also launched a coaching program to help design agencies get started with Edicy. Even though it's easier to build sites with Edicy compared to Wordpress, the program teaches best practices, tips and tricks for creating advanced websites. During the first month of its existence, there are already 8 agencies that have graduated the coaching program. Join us!

One option is to let any designer or agency in the world to build a exceptional custom design for you. There's already a number of companies with experience in creating websites on Edicy. They can also import an existing website or a Wordpress template onto Edicy easily.

If you are a designer, there's always an option to create an Edicy theme yourself. Here's a checklist — the Edicy standard theme definition. Use it as your reference point. In case you need our assistance we'd be glad to help you. Just send us an email and we'll guide you through.

Now, if you are great at what you do and want to make this theme available to other Edicy users too, show it to us. We are offering to buy really great Edicy themes with complete PSDs for $500 a piece.

This deserves a bit longer introduction. Our engineer Oliver is an avid photographer and was longing for a simpler method to feature his photos on Edicy.

Therefore we extended our existing blog tool for this completely new purpose. Each blog post has a cover image with post title on top of it. Each post can contain any number of photos or photo galleries in it.

You can also have posts that don't have cover images — or any photo at all. In that case photo is substituted with a beautiful white heading on a black background rectangle.

From the early days of Edicy, Reykjavik has been the most minimalistic design we've had. Since web has evolved so much since we introduced it, it looked a bit dull and outdated. Therefore Paavel made a complete redesign to it. Still the simplest theme, but with a cool and fresh look.

Bold statements, big letters, no need for pictures if you don't need 'em.

Actually we have one more. Pripyat. Named after the sad little Ukrainian city that was closed down after Chernobyl catastrophe, this barren design is for advanced users only. It's a starting point for the growing band of Edicy developers who build their customer websites on Edicy. It's a design without any style at all. The basic html code and tempalte syntax is there, but no style at all. None. Times New Roman.

What kind of design are you missing? Let us know so we can consider it when designing the next one.

If you've been diving into design coding in Edicy or were just thinking about it then here's a small treat for you. Most of our recent stock designs are open-sourced in GitHub for everyone to download, read, fork, change, pull and push.

Since we are using Git internally to move around stock design files it seemed logical to make them public in the process. The repositories for designs can be found at https://github.com/Edicy

Feel free to fiddle in the source and not that we desperately need help but we'd be more than happy to see pull requests from you guys.

"The main driving force behind our work is user experience. Edicy has proven itself as one of the most user friendly tools out there for web content management. Add to the equation their accessible and super friendly customer support and we are sold."

For softer landing, the developers at Paper first imported a small existing website from a legacy CMS to Edicy. Now, after building sites like Elektriinfo and Salasõna from scratch on Edicy, we can say a proper hello to Velvet guys.